Best Places To Live = Worst Places To Visit

When we were Dallas residents, we used to joke that it was a great place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there. This, meaning that there really wasn’t a lot for tourists to see and do there, though aside from the weather, the great people and the stuff going on made Dallas itself a pretty great place to live.

In the happiest town in the country, candy shops outnumber bars. Downtown parking is free. Nobody smokes.

The rugged Wasatch Range hugs its eastern edge. Sprawling Utah Lake lies to the west. And the monolithic 11,750-foot Mount Timpanogos looms to the north.

The residents are mostly young, outdoorsy and religious. And, if the latest Gallup-Healthways survey is accurate, they, along with neighboring Orem, boast the nation’s highest overall sense of well-being. The annual survey of 500,000 Americans in 189 metropolitan areas quantifies attitudes on quality-of-life factors ranging from emotional and physical health to job satisfaction.

OK, so the locals like their lives. But is that reason enough for the rest of us to visit?

Why is there so often such a gap between the kind of place you want to live, and the kind of place you want to visit on vacation?

Why can’t we eat like the French, Greeks, and Italians, but be governed like the Dutch, the Germans, and the Norwegians? This, Pope Francis, is the root of all social evil!

“Why is there so often such a gap between the kind of place you want to live, and the kind of place you want to visit on vacation?”

Because it’s very unpleasant to live in a place that’s crawling with toursists. If you give people a reason to visit your community, you are basically ruining it.

Although as a resident of the community with the 10th highest well-being according to Gallup, I notice that a lot of the 9 communities above us in the list are also much more interesting to visit. I guess you really can have it all.

Also, I really can’t resist: when you glance at the top and bottom 10 communities, a pattern immediately jumps out at you. It involves latitude.

Why can’t we eat like the French, Greeks, and Italians, but be governed like the Dutch, the Germans, and the Norwegians?

Because human beings only have so much time, energy, and resources, whether on the individual or collective levels. The effort expended to cultivate great cuisine, art, and joie de vivre is effort not expended on industry, civic affairs, and education.

At the risk of getting all Jared Diamond geographic determinist, pleasant climates may tend to dull the work ethic while offering relative greater reward to a life of leisure, food, and artsy-fartsiness. Climates that are cold and not-too-sunny, but which still have a decent growing season (i.e., not arctic tundra), may tend to spur industriousness and inventiveness — gotta figure out how to make the most of summer and survive winter — while blunting opportunities for la dolce vita (can’t grow grapes for wine in Finland).

Why is there so often such a gap between the kind of place you want to live, and the kind of place you want to visit on vacation?

One factor is that places that have tourist-attracting geography often cannot develop industry because of that very geography. Appalachia is a gorgeous region, but those very mountains inhibited transportation, urbanization, and industrialization, leaving it chronically poor for everyday residents. Many Caribbean islands are paradisical, but they are, well, islands, remote, hilly, thick with jungle, and usually tiny. Examples abound.

People in those nice towns eat at home or at friends’ home or at events put on by the groups they belong to. They aren’t much interested in “eating out” and would be horrified by the idea of paying $100 for dinner for two (plus tips).

Besides, they’ve got some great venison, pheasant, and salmon in the freezer, and fresh asparagus, tomatoes and sweet corn in the garden, so why bother.

And instead of fancy dinners, they’d rather spend the money on the snowmobile and the boat anyway. So the restaurants are simple ones, not “upscale”.

Sorry, tourists. (But you’ll eat well if you have a friend in that town.)

Rod, I rather like Dallas when I visited, on several occasions. Though I will admit the July heat was not on the welcome wagon list. I went to the botanical gardens and thought I was going to melt like the Wicked Witch. No wonder every little pool and fountain had a sign reading “Keep Out Of The Water”: they would have been full of visitors otherwise.

These kinds of rankings are at odds with crunchy conservatism, aren’t they? I mean, by presupposing that qualities of place can be measured, and measured by the same rubrics, they assume a bland one-size-fits-all model and, worst of all, exclude anything that can’t be quantified.

Except for Ann Arbor and San Francisco, all of the highest-ranking places on this list are full of soul-deadening McMansion/ gigantic subdivision architecture, strip malls, parking lots, chain big box stores, and other unpleasantnesses. Sure, there are worse things, but surely the best place to live in the US is not the heart of a state so inhospitable to life its largest body of water is an endorheic briny nearly fishless lake.

Areas of the US with distinct *cultural* charms, like your home state, Louisiana, or my home region, New England, will suffer in these kinds of rankings because of the impossibility of capturing in a quantitative model what makes them great places to live. The imperceptibly tumbling down stone walls that crisscross the forests of New England are worth a few extra points by themselves.

“…Climates that are cold and not-too-sunny, but which still have a decent growing season (i.e., not arctic tundra), may tend to spur industriousness and inventiveness — gotta figure out how to make the most of summer and survive winter — while blunting opportunities for la dolce vita (can’t grow grapes for wine in Finland).”

News flash: Minnesota is trying to develop a wine industry. Not really there yet. Grapes whose primary strength is a dogged character produced by suffering don’t produce the best beverage. But we’re working on it, in our typically earnest, Scando-Germanic way. Stay tuned.

“Climates that are cold and not-too-sunny, but which still have a decent growing season (i.e., not arctic tundra), may tend to spur industriousness and inventiveness — gotta figure out how to make the most of summer and survive winter — while blunting opportunities for la dolce vita (can’t grow grapes for wine in Finland).”

I absolutely agree. Where the winter is long and dark, food options are limited. I grew up in the upper Midwest, and we ate lutefisk every Christmas. Our Norwegian relatives thought it amusing, and would say something to the effect of, “You have refrigerators. Why would you still eat lutefisk?”

With wealth, trade, and modern communication, the food culture in northern Europe is improving. New Nordic cuisine is trendy. But it likely will never match the food culture of the French or Italians.

That sounds about right, Noah, and as a native Appalachian, I’d second you on that region. The late, great Harry Caudill, author of the classic Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and under whom I was privileged to have a class back in college, also blamed a lot of it on the Scots-Irish borderlands-derived culture of the people there. I think he had a good point, too.

Why is there so often such a gap between the kind of place you want to live, and the kind of place you want to visit on vacation?

Maybe for the same reason there is often a gap between the kind of person we want to date, and the kind of person we want to marry. Excitement and unpredictability a great fun for awhile, but for the long term stability and dependability are preferable.

People love to make fun of Los Angeles, and as a resident, I always encourage that. I hate to think what our population might be otherwise. L.A. is one of those places that grew in large part because people wanted to live here, not simply because there were (at one time, anyway) abundant jobs. Now, of course, as Rod reminds us, we have very entertaining degenerates to capture the tourists’ attention. But they (the degenerates, not necessarily the tourists)mostly live within five miles or so of Beverly Hills, so the rest of us can ignore them during the ordinary courses of our lives.

Please don’t tell anyone, but we do have more lovely beaches than you could traverse in one or two days, dozens of dramatic mountains, nearly ideal weather over 300 days per year, perhaps half of all the most popular US tourist attractions, and an increasing number of interesting restaurants, many with captivating ocean, mountain, or city views. Let that be our mutual secret. And remember to keep spreading all those L.A. jokes, OK? Thanks!

[NFR: Here, we have a habit of electing our entertaining degenerates to public office. — RD]

@Andy: Because it’s very unpleasant to live in a place that’s crawling with toursists. If you give people a reason to visit your community, you are basically ruining it.

The very best quote I’ve ever read about tourism was in a footnote to David Foster Wallace’s article, “Consider the Lobster:”

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

I don’t think the list tells the tale you’re making it tell. 40% of the best places to live are major tourist draws, Honolulu, the two sets of communities around the San Francisco Bay, and Naples.

Meanwhile at the bottom of the list there’s not one that is attractive to tourists.

Why is there so often such a gap between the kind of place you want to live, and the kind of place you want to visit on vacation?

Many people want to live in a stable and relatively quiet environment, and most vacation spots are full of tourists in various stages of letting their hair down. It takes a thick skin to live next door to a revolving cavalcade of tourists with their varying levels of self-control and views of social propriety.

“Except for Ann Arbor and San Francisco, all of the highest-ranking places on this list are full of soul-deadening McMansion/ gigantic subdivision architecture, strip malls, parking lots, chain big box stores, and other unpleasantnesses.”

I’ve only been to Boulder, CO, (ranked #2) once, but I thought it seemed great. I didn’t get the impression it was filled with, “of soul-deadening McMansion/ gigantic subdivision architecture, strip malls, parking lots, chain big box stores, and other unpleasantnesses,” but maybe I didn’t see enough of it.

I think the Dutch have managed to figure out how to make cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam both worth visiting AND worth living in.

Reminds me of when I was on the job market and figured, “hey– I could move anywhere. Let me check out the jobs situation in New Orleans. I loved that city.” No jobs in my field. None. I later on ended up working alongside someone from New Orleans who echoed the sentiment– she and her husband were from there but had to leave to find decent work in their field.

My wife is from the Provo area, and we visit regularly. There are lots of great places to eat (certainly more so than where I live). Lots of California influence on the food there, imported by the strong California contingent of BYU kids. And it’s gorgeous there.

“Areas of the US with distinct *cultural* charms, like your home state, Louisiana, or my home region, New England, will suffer in these kinds of rankings because of the impossibility of capturing in a quantitative model what makes them great places to live.”

Certainly Utah has no “distinct cultural charms” that might make it appealing to its citizens, does it? Or are we only talking about cultures that Matt in VA finds charming?

“Sure, there are worse things, but surely the best place to live in the US is not the heart of a state so inhospitable to life its largest body of water is an endorheic briny nearly fishless lake.”

The God of the Old Testament said he would make the desert “blossom as the rose.” Not sure if that runs afoul of crunchy conservatism.

I live in Houston, and I love it. it’s not pretty to look at at all, but it has so many great things going:

– One of the best cultural lives in the country: Opera, theater, symphony, musicals, every night
– First rate museums. I went to an exhibit in London’s National Gallery and I was in shock that I was paying to see the same Sargent Singer exhibit I had seen in Houston 9 months before
– Fantastic restaurants
– Multicultural: not only Hispanics but also one of the largest Indian, Chinese and Vietminh communities in the US.
– Mild winters (yeas I hate the summers too, but Dallas is actually hotter – and colder)
– One hour away from the sea. Yes, it’s Galveston, but it has improved a lot in the last 15 years. there is even Opera.
– All that combined with a vibrant economy with low unemployment and low cost of living I moved here from Miami, and was in shock at how much the cheaper Houston housing and living expenses. And, as beautiful as Miami is to look at (and I can look at it for hours on end) there is freaking nothing to do there except go to bars and get wasted.

The sad thing: not only most visitors don’t know how great the city can be, most Houstonians don’t either. All these delights seem reserved for the “inside the 610 Loopers”. Most of my work colleagues have opted for the suburban sprawl (hey, Houston is about 100 miles in diameter) and prefer to be in the car for 2 hours a day, and of course haven’t been in the Museum District since high school.

Me, I live among old growth oaks just 10 miles from the office, in a mere 2,000 sq ft house (tiny, my colleagues would say). But hey, I’m going to the Opera next Thursday.

And I am writing this sipping wine in my garden. The jasmines are in bloom. Pity I cannot post a sample of the smell.

Also, one of the reasons I’d be willing to move back to Utah (I went to high school there) is because not only can I count on the medium-priced houses there to have enough bedrooms for my big family, but also because the older homes there already have substantial backyard orchards, berry canes, grapevines and nicely amended soil for veggie gardens. Mormons, especially Utah Mormons, have been urban homesteading since 1847. There’s such a classic “look” to a desirable LDS home that you can pick them out of the MLS in a minority Mormon area like I live in. So, yeah, McMansions are going up everywhere, but a lot of Mormons like me prefer the older homes with mature food production. That keeps neighborhoods a little more intact over the years, even when the surrounding town goes slightly to seed. Which Provo hasn’t done, since it’s a perpetually refreshed college town.

Noah172,I agree that the central coast of CA,Monterey & Carmel especially are perfection. I would love to retire there one day. I also lived in WV for 3 yrs and it is also incredibly beautiful but also incredibly challenged. What frustrated me about WV was the sense of fatalism – it’s always been this way & always will be. Aargh!
Where I currently live outside of Sacramento is a nice place to live- lots of upscale amenities,a great food scene,etc but it lacks the verve of SF. Other than visiting the Gold Country & the local wineries, I can’t think of why anyone would want to visit. We’re 2 hrs to SF and Tahoe, about 3 to Carmel. I guess that’s our selling point- close to lots of great things!

German food and drink is great. I’d take schnitzel and wurst with a nice pilsner followed by some strudel over pretty much anything. I like Greek food, but to me it doesn’t hold a candle to German food.

David Foster Wallace’s description of tourists is so very sad. Poor man suffered from depression, and, I suspect, that must have colored his view of human nature. I’m a New Orleanian and I’ve never heard any native, no matter which part of the city they were from, refer to tourists in such dismal terms.

BYU-Provo is perhaps the only campus in the country where you would have to travel further than 2 blocks to find a place that sells alcohol. Instead, there must be about 15 Yogurt and Ice Cream Shops that ring the campus. How can a place like that not be happy?

Portland is both a nice place to live, and a fun place to visit–especially if you like the great outdoors. (I know, Rod, I know. Sasquatches. And gayhadis with ear-piercings you could stick a roll of quarters through…)

I think the answer lies in the fact that the most desirable places to visit become the most expensive places to live, and when a place is expensive it becomes for a large number of residents undesirable (no matter how great your restaurant and market options, or how much great culture you have around you, if you’re scraping by you won’t be able to enjoy a lot of it).

Two of the greatest places I’ve lived were D.C. and Paris–both great to visit, and in my case I fortunately had enough income (or in the case of Paris, my family did) to enjoy living there. But I can imagine a lot of DCers and Parisians in lower income brackets not doing so well on the happiness index.

A great place to live if you don’t mind cold weather? Portland, Maine!

I live in a small tourism-based city. And I would agree that a visitor who sticks to the tourist areas will find themselves entertained but may not want to live here. In summer I try to avoid the tourist areas too. Nothing against the tourists, but I woudl rather avoid the crowds.
But I live on the other side of town. We have reasonable house prices, good schools, and a small town feel. The tourist trade has also encouraged a lot of good wineries and golf courses to open up so I can enjoy my hobbies.